The Cobra Effect of unintended consequences is the tip of an enormous iceberg of complex systems feedback loops and interdependency. It is not just the measurable, observed or recorded properties, processes and downstream consequences that concern us. Where we seek to control, shape or otherwise, and more realistically, to (minimally, if constructively) influence the arc […]
Context: Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of an Entire Universe Such induction to general principles from instances is itself, also, a broader lesson regarding complexity. If recognisable (i.e. “real world”) properties of cosmological matter and energy distribution can be inferred from a single galaxy, in what other systems does such a depth of logical […]
I’m pretty sure that all we ever do is generate fragmentary dialects of pre-existing languages, codes, behavioual patterns and conceptual relationships or symmetries. These are ordered structures and complex (adaptive) systems of information and reference that maximally self-propagate and replicate themselves through us as their primary transmission medium, just as they are also our binding […]
Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]
I’m of the exquisitely unpopular, largely incomprehensible and eminently unhelpful philosophical opinion that if we were able to calculate it to within a Planck’s length of its life, the sum total of all complex systems as measured along the axes of energy, information and entropy would be zero. That which remains conspicuously absent (and likely […]
My experience, beyond an effervescing percolation of the very many sociotechnical instances with which both we and our reflexively teleological heuristics of symbolic communication (in and as language) aspire to epistemological closure, is that there is no simplest state or unified descriptive method available to us. Yes, we can iteratively refine taxonomies and (what become) […]
I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]
Complex systems have a way of reproducing themselves quite agnostic of the methods we use to influence or shape them. Where we assert causal ontologies we tend to do so under the scope and rubric of many prior assumptions. Data is a function of observations that tend to reproduce and self-validate the assumptions by which […]
Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]
Metaphorical corollary: is technology the extended phenotype of the genotype of humanity or is humanity the extended phenotype of the genotype of technology? It is really neither and both. The key issue being that the radical inversion of teleological intuitions in language and cognition is a necessarily difficult feat of mental gymnastics. Analogies are useful. […]
All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]
Reference: Kurt Gödel The beauty of this area of logic is that we find ourselves quite inadvertently inhabiting (as much as being inhabited by) a profoundly mercurial and indefinitely extensible as autonomously self-propagating soliton-like system of explanation, definition and knowledge. The resonant antinomy encoded in a system which can both be and not be bounded […]
Daedelus Kite 